Welcome to the Concepticon

This resource presents an attempt to link the large amount of different concept lists which are used in the linguistic literature, ranging from Swadesh lists in historical linguistics to naming tests in clinical studies and psycholinguistics.

A Resource for the Linking of Concept Lists

This resource, our Concepticon, links concept labels from different conceptlists to concept sets. Each concept set is given a unique identifier, a unique label, and a human-readable definition. Concept sets are further structured by defining different relations between the concepts, as you can see in the graphic to the right, which displays the relations between concept sets linked to the concept set SIBLING. The resource can be used for various purposes. Serving as a rich reference for new and existing databases in diachronic and synchronic linguistics, it allows researchers a quick access to studies on semantic change, cross-linguistic polysemies, and semantic associations.

Note that the most important contribution by the Concepticon project are not the definitions given for individual concept sets, but the judgments which individual elicitation glosses to assign to the same concept set. As a result, the definitions may sometimes look less than optimal. We appreciate any help in improving the definitions, but we recommend users to check the list of assigned elicitation glosses first, since these assignments should inform the definition, and not vice versa.

If you want to learn more about the ideas behind our Concepticon, have a look at our about page or read List et al. 2016, presented at LREC.